Abstract
Musical competence may confer cognitive advantages that extend beyond processing of familiar musical sounds. Behavioural evidence indicates a general enhancement of both working memory and attention in musicians. It is possible that musicians, due to their training, are better able to maintain focus on task-relevant stimuli, a skill which is crucial to working memory. We measured the blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) activation signal in musicians and non-musicians during working memory of musical sounds to determine the relation among performance, musical competence and generally enhanced cognition. All participants easily distinguished the stimuli. We tested the hypothesis that musicians nonetheless would perform better, and that differential brain activity would mainly be present in cortical areas involved in cognitive control such as the lateral prefrontal cortex. The musicians performed better as reflected in reaction times and error rates. Musicians also had larger BOLD responses than non-musicians in neuronal networks that sustain attention and cognitive control, including regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, insula, and putamen in the right hemisphere, and bilaterally in the posterior dorsal prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus. The relationship between the task performance and the magnitude of the BOLD response was more positive in musicians than in non-musicians, particularly during the most difficult working memory task. The results confirm previous findings that neural activity increases during enhanced working memory performance. The results also suggest that superior working memory task performance in musicians rely on an enhanced ability to exert sustained cognitive control. This cognitive benefit in musicians may be a consequence of focused musical training.
Highlights
Musical knowledge and skilfulness vary greatly across the population
We focused attention on the slopes of the regression lines estimated for the load-by-group-by-blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) model, i.e. the degree to which the brain-derived measure BOLD was correlated with the behavioural measures of percent correct responses and reaction time (RT)
The influence of individual differences on WM was studied in a comparison of musicians and non-musicians who memorized musical chords in an easy (1B) and a difficult (2B) WM task
Summary
Musical knowledge and skilfulness vary greatly across the population. This provides a basis for the study of how individual differences are reflected in brain activity during perceptive and cognitive processes. Long-term training in cognitive tasks was generally associated with activity increases in the lateral PFC and parietal regions [15], regions that were repeatedly linked to top-down’’ cognitive control mechanisms. We test the hypothesis that musicians’ superior performance in a demanding working memory task with musical chords depends on increased recruitment of brain areas involved in cognitive control, rather than enhanced processing in auditory cortical areas. We predicted that musicians would both perform better in the two WM tasks and have associated stronger brain activation, despite limited advantage from specialized musical knowledge. Stronger activation of ‘‘top-down’’ cognitive control mechanisms would be reflected in enhanced responses in the parietal cortex, lateral PFC regions and ACC
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